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Comment by emileifrem | Hacker News Reader

Please note that this post talks about Neo4j Community. Neo4j is now split into three editions:

* Neo4j Community, a high performance, fully ACID transactional graph database – licensed under the GPL

* Neo4j Advanced, adding advanced monitoring – licensed under the AGPL or a commercial license

* Neo4j Enterprise, adding online backup and High Availability clustering – licensed under AGPL or commercial

See more in the 1.3 announcement (http://blog.neo4j.org/2011/04/neo4j-13-abisko-lampa-released...) and our licensing guide (http://neo4j.org/licensing-guide/).

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A couple perhaps nit-picks. First:

"As well as a slew of new features and improvements, we’re thrilled to announce that the community edition is now entirely GPLv3 licensed – permissive and accommodating to your needs!"

The GPL is not a permissive license as the term is usually understood in the free and open source communities. I believe the FSF is careful to distinguish GPL from permissive licenses.

Second: there are several places on the linked pages that compare this to MySQL, basically saying you can do with it whatever you could do with MySQL as far as the licensing goes.

MySQL is under GPLv2, not GPLv3, so the comparison to MySQL might mislead people.

Re: permissive, I concur! Poor wording on our part. Permissive-r than AGPL perhaps was our thinking. :) But you're absolutely correct that the GPL is not a permissive license. Updated the post!

As for GPLv2 vs v3, in a high-level post like this they're reasonably identical. v3 brings in some nice subtleties like ASL compatibility (a biggie for us!) as well as better patent language. But in terms of use cases where the "virality" kicks in, they're the same.

You could simply do GPLv2 "or later" and get the best of both worlds.

wait... $24,000 a year per server for the ability to do live backup? That's more than Oracle (Standard), even counting support. (This assumes a single processor, of course.)

The main feature (software-wise) in Neo4j Enterprise is High Availability clustering support, which gives you fault tolerance and read scalability. On top of that Neo4j Enterprise also comes with 24/7 enterprise-grade commercial support. You can run it on one core, or 768 cores all for the same price.

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